Communication is often WAY WAY faster when delivered via text than via a video presentation, particularly because written words come at you at the pace your brain can accept them, as opposed to the static speed at which someone can speak them.

Also, writing is SO MUCH EASIER than creating video. Do you really think I would have bothered participating in this conversation if it meant opening up a camera and NLE and cutting together a video of my ugly mug yapping away, with the signature youtube jump cuts to remove the "umms" and "uhhss" and other pauses that you're not currently reading?

Cuz this reply wasn't a coherently delivered, smooth stream-of-conscious delivery. I've already gone back and rephrased several thoughts-- easy to do in text, a pain in the ass to do in video.

And I'm certainly not going to FIRST write this, then read it out loud, THEN edit it, and hope you sit back and watch. And the idea of text-to-video-- seems like adding an extra step.

Video is great, but its the wrong medium for quite a bit of communication.

I think that, in part, the article is misleading since I did not take away that Facebook thinks there's no purpose to text or that it will vanish entirely, and likely they share the same opinion as you.

The counterpart line to the "text is dead" idea is the following from Facebook in the article:

>“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”

To me, this says less about "text is dead" and more "our users are choosing to share experiences with video, and they're doing it off-platform." Similarly, they continue with the following:

>"But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech."

I think 'text is dead' is Facebook's segue to bloviate about an upcoming set of features surrounding multimedia, which in turn is pretty much just a "stop uploading videos elsewhere" gambit. Facebook does do a pretty good job at making videos uploaded elsewhere work seamlessly with Facebook. I'd have to imagine that the next natural step is just to get those on Facebook in the first place.

So, I don't get the impression they want youtube-cut videos to replace the textual Facebook arguments; I think they're just trying to build up hype for FacebookVid or whatever they decided to call their next set of multimedia features.

Well produced video is magic. Think of a movie that was impactful to you -- done well, video can tell a story in an almost magical way.

The reality is that the average video is drivel and not nearly as good as a similar written piece. The FB is either living in a reality distortion field or thinking about high quality ad/infotainment content that produces $ for Facebook.

>Well produced video is magic.

Most of us don't realise how difficult editing is. There's a camera in our phones, and uploading to Facebook, Youtube or Snapchat has never been easier, so now we're all film makers. It just that almost no one realise how hard their favourite podcast or youtube channel has worked on editing. Or how many times they redone the exact same bit, to get it absolutely perfect, and watchable.

It's easier and faster, to re-read a few sentences, edit the worst bit, re-read and post. There's not really a fast way of editing the worst parts of a video.

Of course, movies can be beautiful and even enjoyable because of their slowness sometimes - but that is completely different from the online experience, where everything moves extremely fast and there is always an overload of information, so to keep up with it, you want to be able to ingest it as quickly as possible.

Exceptions apply of course for long form writing pieces, where the pacing and the wording is as much a part of the content as the content itself.

But on facebook ?

> Think of a movie that was impactful to you

I cannot name a single movie that was not dull compared to a book it was based upon.

Not just you -- video is a real time medium, a 3 minute video takes 3 minutes to watch. Text is at your reading speed, and also a lot easier to index.